1 - Office and Household

Summary

This chapter sets out the relationship between local officeholding and the central institution of gendered power in early modern society: the household. Throughout the early modern period, most officeholders were also heads of household. This was the result of legal and social ideas about who should wield state authority; only those who were economically, socially, and domestically ‘independent’ were seen as possessing the necessary capacity for responsible decision-making. In practice, this generally meant middle-aged married men of the middling sort, who dominated most local offices. These men were expected to exercise patriarchal control over others, which brought them into conflict with other men who resented their intrusions as an affront to their own sense of manhood. In many of these cases, policing was characterised by clashes between competing modes of masculinity. It was not, however, an exclusively male domain. Male officers’ wives took part in their husbands’ duties, while women who headed their own households held office in their own right.